"And as Part of Its Commitment to Fearlessness, Breaks Off from 826 National and Expands into White Center with Another Tutoring Space

…

"he nonprofit soon to be formerly known as 826 Seattle was not conceived as a branch of 826 National. Hein had been organizing it for a year under other names. It was originally called Pencil Head “for the blink of an eye” until “these kids told me that was stupid,” and then it was going to be “Studio 26” until Eggers asked Hein to join 826 National. Since then, Hein says, they’ve been “operating at capacity for all our programs. We’ve never taken a loan, we’ve ended up in the black every year. Even through the worst of the economic decline, our budget’s been going up and up and up and up.” Staffing has increased from “two and a half” employees to 19. The first year’s annual budget was a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. This year, the budget is almost a million.

So if everything’s going so well, why rock the boat? Hein has nothing but kind words to say about 826 National, but she thinks her nonprofit has always been “kind of the independent chapter” and needs to grow beyond the 826 National mission statement. Plus, as 826 National grows and expands, they will probably need to standardize their procedures in order to capture the larger grants that a truly national educational program needs. Hein hopes the BFI will become an affiliate of 826 National; she’d like to pilot educational programs that she can then pass on to the nationwide branches. Gerald Richards, CEO of 826 National, issued a statement saying, "We wish them well,” but did not elaborate on the future of the BFI’s involvement with 826 National.

So what will the BFI do differently? For one thing, Hein says, they’re going to open a branch in White Center by 2016. And obviously the name is changing. A lot of serious thought has gone into the terminology behind the BFI. Students and tutors will be “Field Agents,” Hein is the “Bureau Chief,” and starting next week, students will be doing after-school tutoring and taking other classes at the Greenwood Field Office, which will still be hidden behind a teleporter in the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Company.

Hein says the organization makes most of its money from individual donors, a rarity in the nonprofit education field. “Are we crazy to think we can raise another million dollars,” she says, “and open another center somewhere else? Or two centers? Or five centers?” She’s considered offices in Burien, and she calls Tukwila and the Crossroads neighborhood on the Eastside interesting possibilities. Wherever the field offices open, Hein wants them to become intrinsically tied to their neighborhoods. Seattle feels more divided than ever, she says, thanks to worsening traffic and economic disparity. But “what happens to kids when they really identify with their neighborhood and their sense of confidence and their sense of safety with their neighborhood?”

The programs that 826 Seattle has become known for will still be happening at the Bureau, including tutoring assistance, classes on writing family history “through poetry, prose, and a comic/graphic novel,” travel and food writing classes, and a National Novel Writing Month meet-up group for high-schoolers. The programs will still be free and available to kids from all financial backgrounds; they serve three thousand kids a year in Greenwood alone. Hein is bursting with ideas involving low-power radio and incorporating neighborhood businesses into the act. Hein says, “One of my fantasies is that the kids with their adults will research the history of Greenwood and perform a play about it with the adults at the Taproot Theatre.” She begins whirling off ideas—personal histories of immigrant small-business owners, songwriting projects—until it’s obvious that she’s just gotten started."

He fell from the ninth floor
He hanged himself
He slipped on a piece of soap while washing
He hanged himself
He slipped on a piece of soap while washing
He fell from the ninth floor
He hanged himself while washing
He slipped from the ninth floor
He hung from the ninth floor
He slipped on the ninth floor while washing
He fell from a piece of soap while slipping
He hung from the ninth floor
He washed from the ninth floor while slipping
He hung from a piece of soap while slipping

-----

The poem was a savage swipe at the old Security Police, who inhabited the top floors of John Vorster Square, the nondescript office block that squats at the bottom of Ferreirasdorp and gazes blankly onto the top deck of the M1 South.

Between October 27 1971 and January 30 1990, eight people died there after being detained by the Security Police: Ahmed Timol ("fell" from the 10th floor); Wellington Tshazibane (found hanged in his cell); Elmon Malele (died after hitting his head on a table); Matthews Mojo Mabelane (fell from the 10th floor); Dr Neil Aggett (found hanged); Ernest Moabi Dipale (found hanged); Maisha Stanza Bopape (probably killed during electric shock torture and his body disposed of - it was never found); Clayton Sizwe Sithole (found hanged)."

Ten years ago a book like this would have invigorated American Indian literary studies, overtly challenging its typical practices by demonstrating the generative possibilities of a focus not on loss, victimry, or mere survival, but rather on survivance, Gerald Vizenor's (then) iconoclastic concept of active native presence, of survival as resistance. Back then Vizenor was still more outlaw than insider, a self-declared postmodernist working across multiple genres—poetry, fiction, the essay, and, importantly, critical theory—within a still largely undertheorized field. His adapted use of the recovered word "survivance" was still considered idiosyncratic and odd, even a little threatening in its disregard for convention. There were still heated debates about the precise meanings of survivance, and of the many other terms from the developing lexicon of Vizenor's neologisms and adaptations, and whether they would have any lasting importance. Vizenor and his lexicon have earned ardent admirers over the past ten or fifteen years, and these fans will readily embrace Survivance. The collection will have a more limited impact, however, than a similar collection might have had in the past. It will less likely provoke ideas or practices that are radically new.

Of particular interest to fans—and readers of SAIL—will be Vizenor's own contribution to the eighteen essays collected here, "Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice," which opens the volume. In the early and late paragraphs, Vizenor lays out surprisingly accessible definitions for the collection's key critical term, a stark contrast to the discursive tactics more typical of his previous works. As readers of SAIL will be aware, Vizenor first demonstrated—rather than clearly defined—the potential meanings of survivance in a series of provocations about American Indian representation, published in 1994 as Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance; he continued this demonstration—with somewhat more clear definitions—in Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence, his similarly suggestive provocations published in 1998. Both Manifest Manners and Fugitive Poses have been highly influential. Over time, as Vizenor's difficult prose style and fast-paced riffs on poststructuralist and postmodernist theories have become more familiar to readers in the field, survivance has become a common element of our scholarship, pushing beyond the ubiquity of Vizenor's earlier emphasis on "trickster discourse," a concept demonstrated in venues such as Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures, his edited collection first published in 1989. Indeed, survivance is increasingly deployed in performed and published scholarship, across the inter-disciplines of Native American and Indigenous studies, without clear attribution, critical genealogy, or extensive explanation.

Vizenor's new willingness to define survivance in relatively straightforward terms may reflect, in part, the degree to which this postmodern adaptation of a recovered word no longer feels especially radical or complex within the increasingly sophisticated and increasingly professionalized fields of Native American and Indigenous studies. It has become part of how we "do" our work, especially within American Indian literary studies. Survivance may be close to achieving the status of the phrase "Native American Renaissance," the title of Kenneth Lincoln's early celebration of contemporary American Indian literature, much read and often cited following its publication in 1983, but mostly ignored in the current conversation. Lincoln's title has outlived the actual content of his poetic meditations, so that his phrasing is routinely deployed as shorthand for the complexities of the post-1968 era but without attribution, genealogy, or justification. Survivance appears similarly on its way to becoming a shorthand for the complexities of "active native presence" and "survival as resistance." The publication of this edited volume may be a first major sign of the term's rapid detachment from Vizenor's postmodernist specificity, irony, and radical potential.

More in line with Vizenor's previous analytical work, the majority of "Aesthetics of Survivance" is devoted to provocative meditations on American Indian representation through new and repeated stories of particular instances of active native presence and to ironic if somewhat incomplete engagements with recent debates in American Indian literary studies. Vizenor engages in direct responses to Anishinaabe novelist David Treuer's controversial Native American Fiction: A User's Manual, published in 2006, and to the rise of so..."

"Unitarian Universalists hold the Principles as strong values and moral teachings. As Rev. Barbara Wells ten Hove explains, “The Principles are not dogma or doctrine, but rather a guide for those of us who choose to join and participate in Unitarian Universalist religious communities.”

1st Principle: The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
2nd Principle: Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
3rd Principle: Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;
4th Principle: A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
5th Principle: The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;
6th Principle: The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;
7th Principle: Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part."